Contributor Ape

It would be great if the GNOME Games set is split into separate packages, as out of the 10 or so games I only actually want 2 or 3 which means I have to hide the rest with the menu editor.

How to make multivolume archive without command-line tools?
Archive Manager can't (or this feature is well hidden),
click on any file - "Archive..." don't give me this feature.

Currently most developer responses to ideas are anonymous. Why is this? This only creates more distance between users and developers. Knowing who wrote a response can be very helpful e.g. when you want to help implementing an idea, so you know who to contact.

OS X has this nifty feature that automatically detects text fragments like appointments and addresses, and lets you choose smart actions with a click: create a new contact, map an address, or create an iCal event.
http://images.apple.com/macosx/features/images/300_mail_auto_address_20071016.p ng

GNOME should offer this functionality for all text fields, so that developers can enable this in Evolution, Pidgin, Firefox, etc.

This way every time I get an email with details of an event, I just hover over or select the text containing location and date information and choose "Add Appointment" from a drop down. This action would bring up the calendar with the information parsed from the text filled in. Similarly when my Pidgin buddy sends me his address info, I just right click it and select map location (this would pull up google maps for example) etc.

This is the kind of integration, ease of use and attention to detail that is direly needed in Ubuntu (and GNOME in particular).

Edit: See comments for more brainstorming :)

There should be an option to empty the trash on log out (and on shutdown and similar).

Now I must empty the trash manually. I know I could make a cron for auto deleting trashes, but that should be time based.

It would be nice to have a feature like: "delete items older than 2 weeks"

Looking at the success of Wikipedia and the relative lack of it for bundled help/documentation of FOSS (or indeed manuals in general), one gets this idea: How about setting up a Wikipedia-like wiki for help/docs with stable versions (i.e. versions marked as good by a dev/trusted user), and the latest stable versions would automatically be used as the bundled help/docs for each release (or latest stable, but with some date limit)?

This way whenever you click on a help button or help menu option, you would get the text which originated from the wiki, and have a link for the latest (on-line) version where you could go to look for updates/related hints, ask questions on a talk page, add omissions/corrections, etc. The categorizations, redirect pages and related page / see also links on Wikipedia are also pretty good, and maintained by the community; it is not so easy for a passer-by to pitch in there for the help/docs of Ubuntu.

Note that this is not at all the same as various forums and wikis which are related to Ubuntu / Linux, etc. It is sad that the best way to get information is actually there (or Google, more likely than not) instead of the bundled help/docs, and this idea is about improving the bundled help/docs (ideally, all of them) with the help of a wiki, not adding yet another separate source of information. Also, while the current Ubuntu help/docs don't score highly on the "better than Google for its topic" count, Wikipedia does, so the approach should be very sound.

I think this approach would make the help/documentation of Ubuntu far better than any of the proprietary competitors (for whom this method would presumably not work), and if the startup page of Firefox were the help/docs equivalent of Wikipedia main page (and look similar), it would give the non-developer a good and immediate (at a glance, no reading required) analogy to understand what the idea of free software is about, and many more would probably pitch in with the help/docs if they associated them with Wikipedia (it has enormous mindshare, after all).

Or simply add support for monitoring the network connectivity from the network manager applet icon.
i hate having them both next to each other.. it looks stupid..

Note to Mods: This Idea is NOT a Duplicate of Idea #14003, which has been marked as "Already Implemented" (see below). The already implemented functionality is only available on the Alternate CD. This idea is to add the functionality to the Standard CD.

According to Ubuntu's Upgrade Notes, the Alternate CD includes functionality to allow for upgrading from the CD, rather than from the repositories.

This functionality should be included in the Standard (i.e. "Live") CD.

This idea is in response to Idea #14003 being marked as "Already Implemented". Idea #14003 requested dist-upgrade-from-CD functionality be included, to which the developer response was "It has been possible since day 1. See https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UpgradeNotes."

According to the linked Upgrade Notes, dist-upgrade-from-CD is available, but only from the Alternate CD.

Either the contributor for Idea #14003 was not clear enough, or - more likely - the developer who commented didn't consider that the vast majority of people do not know/think about/use the Alternate CD.

More importantly, while the Alternate CD is a logical place to have edge-case installation functionality, I think that one could make a strong argument that dist-upgrade-from-CD is not an "edge case".

Therefore, dist-upgrade-from-CD functionality that is available on the Alternate CD should be included also on the standard LiveCD.

[....]

See GDebi for great use of gksu. You can start the application without root rights and be able to get them when needed. Please implement this great feature in synaptic, nautilus, gedit and may other applications, too.

There should be an option to set a screensaver as a desktop wallpaper like in OS X

When moving windows it is possible to move the windows partly off-screen, past the screen edge. This is very annoying when you want to place the window in a corner. The snap-window option helps a little but it is still possible to push-through the snapping.

I like to have the option to prevent the windows from moving off-screen.

For example look at the (windows) utility allsnap.

Promote one feature or software daily on Ubuntu.com.

We need to have well-informed users. People don't have the time to go through a list of features, one a day is a big achievement.

There are many great ideas here on brainstorm that have gotten a lot of votes, but no official Ubuntu feedback. I think whenever an idea reaches a certain amount of votes - lets say 500 - it should warrant feedback from the Ubuntu team. Something short like
'yep this is a good idea, we'll seriously consider it'
or
'that is an awful idea, forget it!'
would suffice, so one can better tell if popular ideas have a realistic chance of getting picked up or not.

Some ideas already have this kind of feedback (or even more detailed) but I think a high number of positive votes should always warrant official feedback.

If possible, could suspend and hibernate be grayed out or hidden on any machine where it does not work?
If this is not possible in an automatic way, then make it a simple configuration option.

This is not a dupe of http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/6909/ that calls for disabling suspend and hibernate all out. I only want it disabled if it doesn't work on the machine in question.

Main reason being that I know of some people who keep accidentally trying to suspend and/or hibernate out of habit from when they used windows, where this did work [bleh]. I'm tired of hearing them complain about it.

It would like to see a powerful framework for creating games in Linux. Something like DirectX in Windows.

Ubuntu Tweak is such a good tool for getting your Ubuntu system to work just right, I think it should be included by default. The first thing that I do when installing a system is put Tweak on it and fiddle a bit. It offers a comfortable, non-intimidating GUI for new/intermediate users to tweak their system. This is consistent in Ubuntu's quest to be Linux for Human Beings. A new user can use it to customize their GNOME setup and Compiz, or add easy scripts like Open As Root to Nautilus.

http://ubuntu-tweak.com/

Now you can only pick a certain file for certain system sound, but it would be great if you could also download and choose entire sound schemes for the system along with visual theme.

I am sure you will mark this as duplicate, either way, I think that there are small differences between this idea and similar ones.

First of all, I heard Canonical plans to invest in mainstream, let me say something, mainstream doesn't really need a lot more money than it has now and more work there would just be redundant. I think that if Canonical wants to make a difference, they should put money where it is really needed, there are weaknesses in our Linux OSes.

I think, we need improvements in the development platform, I am the kind of guy that really only needs geany and valgrind to do all his Linux development, however a lot of dev. people have been spoiled by the other parties. There are things like step-back and form designers that these people need. Novell as of now is pushing for Mono to replace native apps, and it is doing it by adding this sort of tools to mono development. I got to say, it would be terrible if developers stopped making native apps and we ended with a half-done OS in which most of the available applications are non-native, we need better tools for native development.

However, please don't focus on doing a monolythical app that does everything and can't be split, instead it would be better to make services that could be used by any IDE that's interested in using them. One part that has issues right now is debugging, in which the command line tools are powerful, but devs from this time are used to GUIs in the debugging world.

So, it would be nice to have some sort of service that could examine a program's execution at the same time it is communicating with an IDE that is using it. So the IDE can use information about the execution flow, contents of arrays, etc, and also the IDE would be able to use break points and step using this server program.

In the form designer area, an open format for GTK form XML files, that are then compiled by an extra app would be nice, well, I am not sure how good Anjuta is on this area so far, still improvements in form design will always be welcome.

Now here is the important section: We need a way to have programming projects compiled directly into .deb packages. Right now there are too many intermediary stages. The best for ubuntu would be to allow making ubuntu deb packages very easily, remember, the easier it is to make these packages the more applications easy to install in ubuntu there will be.

[....]

Problem:
The default install of Abiword comes without .odt support (and misses many other formats). The user has to install the abiword-plugins package to work with .odt files.

If I had not explicitly sought for Abiword's .odt support I would have reverted to OpenOffice.

Spending extra time to make Abiword compatible is quite a high barrier for normal users (=users that expect an application to work out of the box).

Solution:
Abiword should support .odt by default. Either recommend to install the abiword-plugins package when installing Abiword or integrate the plugins into Abiword (means they cannot be removed).

At least integrate .odt support somehow BY DEFAULT.